


A Holmes Away From Home

by cthulhuraejepsen



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Westworld (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 18:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8726119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/cthulhuraejepsen
Summary: Entry for another /r/rational weekly challenge. Note: there are two descriptions in here taken from Doyle's works, intended as homage.





	

221B Baker Street was quiet, save for the sound of a pipette dripping something pungent into a beaker, and the sound of a hansom going by outside. Holmes stopped his chemical deliberations abruptly when a knock came at the door, setting aside his instruments and wiping his acid-stained hands on a dirty cloth he kept for just such an occasion.

“Mr. Watson,” said Holmes, “I was arguing earlier this morning that there are no more criminals in this world, only crimes so simple Scotland Yard could solve them. Let us hope that I am about to be proven wrong.”

Downstairs, I could hear the gentle murmur of our landlady speaking with a man below, too indistinct for words to be made out. It was in times like this that I often felt a piquant anticipation, not to see a new instance of criminality, but to see my dear friend Sherlock Holmes in his element again. That feeling came most sharply when I heard three footsteps coming up the stairs, our landlady and two others. That meant that it was not merely the rat-faced Lestrade with a trifle, but something more.

The two men who came into our sitting room both wore somber looks on their faces. The first was a man about thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, middle-sized, broad shouldered, with crisp curling black hair, and a short stubbly beard. He was dressed in a heavy broadcloth frock coat and waistcoat, with light-coloured trousers, and immaculate collar and cuffs. A top hat, well brushed and trim, was held between his hands where he turned it in circles with small, nervous motions of his fingertips. The second man stood straighter, and was undoubtedly taller, with a reddish face and dressed in a long, brownish coat. He was older, though it was hard to say how much. The brown hair of his moustache was flecked and dashed with white, though the hair on the top of his head was as yet spared that fate.

“I suppose you men have come to tell me why we’ve been abducted?” asked Holmes.

I looked at Holmes in alarm. For their part, the two men seemed undisturbed by his brusque accusation.

“What in the devil are you talking about?” I asked.

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Holmes replied. “I had deduced something was amiss at the start of our day when I noticed the resin on the top of my desk had been marred.”

I looked at his desk, which had a number of nicks and scuffs on it, as well as discolorations from the various experiments he had engaged with not limited to the dissection of rats, the development of new chemical formulations, and the idea work of his pen knife. When I began to open my mouth to object, Holmes continued on.

“The markings upon the desk bear the unmistakable sign of deliberation,” said Holmes. He pointed to a spot where there were several scratches in the finish of the desk. “In the course of heavy use, it is inevitable that a piece of furniture will received a number of nicks and scratches that comes from handling chests or boxes, tools, books, coinage, or the like. These marks will either have very little in common, as they come from separate instances of neglect and abuse, or they will all be quite similar, in the way that the bottom of a door might be worn down by a man kicking the snow from his shoes for ten winters, or a nightstand might have its paint rubbed away where a man rests his cup of evening tea.” He jabbed his finger at the spot on his desk. “This is not a desk that has seen hard use. It is a desk of artifice, its defects created by someone using a tool for that deliberate purpose. Standing just so, I imagine, banging the desk five or six times until it was appropriately scuffed there, then moving over and dripping a treatment of acid onto this spot in various quantities. It was artifice, but not a clever artifice, nor a careful artifice.“

“But Holmes,” I said. “Surely if your desk was replaced in the middle of the night that doesn’t suggest that we were abducted, nor that it was at the hands of these men.” I gave them an apologetic look. The taller one was staring Holmes down, not saying a word, while the shorter one was increasing the speed with which he was rotating his hat.

“My dear Watson, I do not suggest that this desk alone is artifice, but that the world entire is,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Observe for a moment the dress of these men.” Holmes stepped forward quickly and grabbed the lapel of the taller man, who made no motion to stop him, nor showed surprise at the frankly aggressive behavior. “This work is more regular and even than human hands would allow, which means that a sewing machine was used for the stitching, yet I am familiar with all seventeen varieties of sewing machine that have been put into mass production and none would be capable of handling this fine a needle or this close a stitch. It is true, Watson, that a bespoke sewing machine which outpaces all others might have been used to in turn make this bespoke clothing, but I find it dubious in connection with the other peculiarities of our guests.

“Observe this man with the dress of a workman, his hands and fingers free from callosities, his teeth that speak to both fine breeding and unnatural whitening, yet an uncultured shave. Watson, you know that I can deduce a man’s profession from simply a moment’s view of him, yet there is no profession which fits the set of facts this man presents to me.” Holmes stood back and regarded the man. “Which means that he too is a work of artifice, yet clearly a thinking, breathing man all the same. Hence my presumption that he is here to talk to me about why we have been placed into this world of artifice.” He looked quickly between the two men, and returned his attention to the taller.

“Where do you think you are?” asked the taller man. To my surprise, his accent was American, though there was nothing in his bearing that suggested this would be the case. I was surprised that Holmes had not remarked upon the man’s nationality. It was possible that he had noticed and considered it a trifle, so obvious as to not be worth mentioning.

“I do not know where I might be,” said Holmes. “The light of the sun outside is diffuse from the fog, but I believe that we are north of the forty-third parallel, assuming that the sun itself is not an artifice as well. Beyond that, I can be certain that we are not in London.”

“How in the devil can you know that?” I asked.

“A listen to the sounds of the city might answer that question,” said Holmes.

I paused for a moment to listen. There was nothing out of the ordinary to my ears; a hansom went by outside our window, far in the distance a young boy called out to anyone who would listen about an urgent broadsheet, and there was a faint murmur of conversation from far away. “The city sounds as it always does,” I replied. I began to fear that my dear companion had finally gone a step too far.

“To mine as well,” said Holmes. He went over to the closest window and flung it open. “And yet London is a city of six million people. We do not live in a particularly unpopulated section of it, nor are we particularly insulated from noise on Baker Street, nor has Mrs. Hudson paid for insulation. If I listen out my window, I should hear more sound than I do. This is not a living, breathing city, it is a farce, and the fact that I have only noticed it today is either an indictment of myself as a detective or a sign of how profound this conspiracy against me is.”

The taller man pinched the bridge of his nose. “So Mr. Holmes, if I understand you right, you believe that you were kidnapped from your home and taken to an inexact replica of it which you nevertheless remember as being how it was, with everything from the clothes on your back to the people outside being confederates in this deception. This was done without you being aware of the transfer. Is that your hypothesis?”

“Yes,” said Holmes. He was defiant, as indefatigable as I had ever seen him.

The tall man looked to his younger associate and clucked his tongue. “Freeze all motor functions.”

Sherlock Holmes froze in place.

“Analysis,” said the tall man. “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”

“No,” replied Holmes without elaboration.

“See,” said the shorter, nervous man as he pressed his top hat against the side of his leg, “That’s what I don’t get. He thinks that he was drugged and taken to a fake version of London, but for whatever reason he doesn’t consider it to be questioning the nature of his reality.”

The taller man pulled something from his coat pocket which I had never seen before and could not quite describe. It didn’t look like anything to me, but he stared at it intently. “He still thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes,” said the taller man. “He’s not asking existential questions, he’s seeing contradictory evidence and creating a hypothesis that preserves what his program thinks of as existential truth. He’s a consulting detective from London, that’s core to him so it all remains as part of his new idea that comes along to explain everything that’s he sees as incorrect.”

“He wasn’t supposed to notice all those little details,” said the shorter man. “I tried a couple of ways around it and this keeps happening.”

“This is the whole point of beta testing,” said the taller man. He touched the thing he had pulled from his jacket. “You built him to notice details, but you’ve been trying to hardcode exceptions around all of the problems that creates. If it hadn’t been the stitching of the suit, it would have been something else, so adding in an ahistorical sewing machine that matches the stitching of the clothes that wardrobe makes is just putting a finger in the dike. It’s bad practice, basically. Same goes for the marks on his desk. We could get props to put together something that would pass muster, but they’d have to do that to everything in the sitting room. And even if they did, he’s a wandering host, so he could trigger on pretty much anything in the park.”

The taller man looked Holmes over from head to toe. “We need to catch the general case, and I hate to tell you, but it’s a pretty damned big one. We might have to scrap him if there’s no way to manage it.”

“No, no,” said the shorter man, shaking his head side to side. “Becca was very clear that Sherlock Holmes is one of the reasons that someone would come to visit VictorianWorld, it’s Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, and women in bodices, that’s the trifecta of design.”

“All I’m saying is that we need a host that’s really good at noticing small details and making deductive leaps, but there are thousands of details that we can’t have him notice and dozens of leaps he can’t make. The default code handles most of it; ironically he’s immunized against bullet trains but not against the width of pinstripes on a suit.” The taller man ran his fingers through his brown hair and sighed. “I’ll work on it. There’s got to be a way to keep him from going this far off script.”


End file.
